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Continued from page 3

An example of that comes from an area I work in – social business. There is precious little proof that social business platforms can deliver what companies most want from them – culture change or growth. We assume that a more social workplace will be different but we don’t discuss in any detail what those differences will be.

I think that leaves us in a shaky position with respect to how we look at evidence. Over the past few years, going back to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s first book Fooled By Randomness we’ve been fighting of the sense of how random life has become. Taleb’s view is that much of what we witness as success is actually random, and demonstrably so. Black Swan of course suggested that a lot of the circumstances around us are a result of freak chance. People feel uncomfortable with those ideas. But I think they are where we are at.

In the middle of extreme change all we can rely on is our ability to construct frameworks of explanation that are useful and somewhat satisfying, for a period of time. To think differently you need to situate yourself in this flux, exercise Mr Slow and learn how to create new categories of explanation.

# Rule 5. It is more random than we want to believe and your explanatory frameworks are weaker than they seem, anyway. We have to think differently.

5. Knowing the information layer

Right now we are actively creating a new information layer around things like social business, big data, scientific agility within enterprises, and innovation methods. As we create that layer, I read a lot of articles that are really reacting against a vanishing reality. For example here on Forbes there are regularly articles that rail against the performance of CEOs. They judge the CEO against yesterday’s criteria. To be perfectly fair, the old criteria of stock market performance is still active and relevant but it cannot survive. A lot of writers are wrestling with how we might judge performance in new ways – See Steve Denning’s pieces on shareholder value, for example.

To know the information layer is to be conscious about where you invest your energy and beliefs. And thinking differently is all about that – being conscious of why you think the way you do, bringing slow out of the closet.

# Final rule. Your different thinking is a product of what goes on in a changing information layer. Understand that and new ideas will open up to you.